[ADVISORY] Some login IPs to be retired next week

On Monday, 3 August, we’ll be turning off some old IP addresses on our login servers.

These IP addresses have not been in active rotation for over a month, meaning that Residents who use “normal” login procedures won’t notice their loss.

However, we’ve identified a small number of Residents who, at their own initiative or as an attempt to debug various Support requests, have customized their logins with the –LoginURI command line option to point to one of the decommissioned addresses.

It is also possible that some Residents will see their logins failing due to stale DNS caches, either local to their machines or (less likely) maintained by their respective ISPs.

We’ve emailed those Residents who have been employing direct logins.

In the event you find your own login disrupted next Monday, we suggest you first refresh your local DNS cache.

Windows users

  • go to Start -> Run, type in: cmd and press Enter.
  • At the prompt, type:  ipconfig /flushdns and press Enter.  (Please note the space between the first word and the slash.)
  • When the prompt returns in the window, close it with the widget or type: exit and press Enter.
OS/X users
  • Start an instance of Terminal.app (if you haven’t docked the app, it will usually be located in the /Applications/Utilities path on your boot drive.)
  • At the prompt, type:  dscacheutil -flushcache and hit Return (please note the space between the first word and the hyphen).
  • Close the window using the widget or by typing: exit and hitting Return.
Linux users will need to research the documents for their distro. Some distros use some variation of: /etc/init.d/nscd restart in a terminal window.
If you try to correct persistent DNS errors and these steps are unsuccessful, the next suggested step is to file a service ticket with your ISP, requesting them to refresh their DNS pointers to secondlife.com. (Again, it’s unlikely that this step will be necessary, but it could happen.)
Please file a support ticket if these steps don’t resolve DNS errors when attempting to log in.